ev godot's blog

'Faust was quickly hailed as the incarnation of the German character and influenced German historiography, philosophy, and self-interpretation. Millions of young men decided they were like Faust, and some found the German destiny in boundless, ruthless, Faustian striving. Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation (1819), considered such striving as the essence not merely of man but of the cosmos. Spengler, precisely a hundred years later, saw Faust as the representative of Western man and called Western civilization "the Faustian culture." After all that, Faust - as who would not? - seems rather trying: one finds oneself eager to not his faults, his lack of humor, his pretentiousness, his self-deceptions. But Goethe used Faust's incurable romanticism as an effective foil for Mephistopheles. The nineteenth century thrilled to Faust's elevated cadences and put up with Mephistopheles' uninhibited sarcasm. The modern reader finds himself embarrassed by Faust's flowery phrases, and relieved by the cynical retorts that reminds us continually that Goethe never wholly identified himself with his romantic hero. If Faust's poetic flights sometimes seem glib, that is not Goethe's fault but Faust's - and not his only fault either. It is, moreover, one of the devices by which Goethe makes Mephisto an engaging personality in spite of everything.

Even as Shakespeare enlists our sympathy for Lear and Coriolanus - although they behave repulsively in many ways - by wisely choosing their antagonists [love the idea of faust as mephisto's antagonist instead of vice versa, but also intrigued by the coriolanus/aufidius parallel implied...], Goethe forces us to sympathize with Mephistopheles. Unlike Faust, Mephisto has a sense of humor and is even capable of laughing at himself; he is a keen psychologist who sees through convention and pretense; and, though radically dishonest when it suits his purposes, he confronts us with a rarely equaled candor just when Faust's enthusiasm outsoars all scrupulous concern with truth or honesty. It may well be that Mephistopheles is Goethe's greatest single creation, and that he has come into his own only in the twentieth century, after Heine and Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, Freud and Shaw, Gide and Joyce, Mann and Sartre - who would hardly be offended at being called Mephisto's progeny - had changed our sensibilities.

Of course, Goethe's Mephistopheles is not without ancestors, and the most important of these may be found in the Bible. It is a commonplace that Goethe's Prologue in Heaven is modeled on the first two chapters of the Book of Job, but it has not been widely noted how much his Mephisto owes to the few lines spoken by Satan. After God's praise of Job, "that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil, Satan answered the Lord: Does Job fear God for nothing?" And after God has taken away all that Job had and reproved Satan, saying that "still he holds fast his integrity," Satan retorts: "Skin for skin! All that a man has he will give for his life; but put forth your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face." This is Mephistopheles in ovo: a cynicism of nihilistic proportions. But what poet before Goethe realized this possibility? And it was Goethe, too, who fused this nihilism with his own inimitable sense of humor, now broad and earthy, now acidly penetrating.

Some critics still lament the fact that some of Heine's tenderest poems are punctured in the last line by a ruthless cynicism. They do not deny that this is specifically modern, but it is an aspect of modernity that they oppose. it was partly for this reason that the early twentieth-century poet Stefan George, and his very influential "Circle", considered Heine an arch-villain. (They had other reasons, too; for example, Heine's immensely witty but nasty polemic against the poet Platen, though written in 1829, was in many ways applicable to Stefan George - not only as a man but also as a poet.) George's followers, ranging all the way from the perceptive Friedrich Gundolf to some brutal Nazi hacks, lacked the deeply humane quality of Heine's irony and underestimated both his poetry and his superb prose. They considered him the ancestor of modern journalism. But it seems far more just to see him as a link between Goethe and Nietzsche (as Nietzsche himself saw Heine) - a link between Faust and the twentieth century.

Goethe realized the limitations of romanticism and its questionable character even before romanticism had become the style of an age. The very figure of Faust which inspired romantic poets, philosophers, and composers, and was accepted by the German people as their own ideal prototype - this poetic but unscrupulous titan who, for all his noble sentiments, becomes involved in brutal deeds - is the constant butt of Mephisto's mockery. The function of Mephistopheles resembles that of Heine's sudden sarcasms: romantic reverie is felt to be too glib, too near the cliché, too far from honesty - and hence must be exposed. It will no longer do to import comic scenes into a tragedy, as Shakespeare did: what is wanted is a device that will permit the poet a continual contrast to point up the questionable character of our feelings and conventions - what feelings hide behind conventions , and how conventional most of our feelings are - in one world - Mephistopheles. Thus Goethe's Faust is closer to Ulysses than to the Odyssey. It is one of the first and greatest works of modern literature. And Mephistopheles is one of the most inspired characters in the whole of world literature.'

Summary:

Nathaniel has a traumatic childhood memory. His father was killed in a freak accident, and Nathaniel believes it happened at the hands of the Sandman - the frightening nightmare from a children's tale who, he believed, used to visit his father at night and once, when Nathaniel dared to listen in, attacked him and threatened to steal his eyes.

Nathaniel is in college now, but when he has a strange encounter with a barometer salesman, he believes to have re-encountered his father's murderer, the Sandman himself. His professor vouches for the salesman, who he claims to have known for a long time, but this fails to reassure Nathaniel.

On his visit home he is so preoccupied with thoughts of the supernatural that he begins to annoy his fiancé Clara, who is very rational about these things. 'Yes, there are dark forces, and they have real effects,' says Clara, 'but they come from you yourself, and they will only hurt us if you let them! The evil forces that haunt us are only reflections of ourselves and our fears!'

Nathaniel and Clara both feel misunderstood by each other and begin to drift apart.

Nathaniel channels his feelings into a horrifying poem in which the Sandman steals Clara's eyes, which fly into Nathaniel's chest - only for Clara to cry out that he has been deceived: they weren't her eyes, but drops of Nathaniel's own blood. She is lying, and Nathaniel opens his eyes to behold her empty sockets.

Nathaniel reads the poem to Clara. Clara, who has grown tired of his poems about the supernatural, is a bad listener and knits while he reads, then tells him to burn the 'senseless' poem. Nathaniel calls Clara an 'automaton' who has no sensitivity for the irrational feelings enveloping him. Her brother challenges Nathaniel to a duel, and they are to the point of firing on each other when Clara intervenes. Nathaniel promises to resist the dark forces which have come between them.

Back at college, the salesman reappears. This time, he sells Nathaniel a little telescope. He looks out the window with it, where he can see the professor's daughter Olympia sitting in her room across the street. Olympia is strange; she always sits stiffly in that room, staring sightlessly before her. But through the telescope her gaze becomes lively and Nathaniel falls in love with her.

They dance at the professor's party. Everyone finds Olympia mechanical, too perfect, passive, cold, with no original thought in her mind. But whenever Nathaniel is on the brink of noticing this too, he looks through the telescope and sees Olympia transfigured through the love he feels for her; or he touches her hand, and from the heat of his own body, her bloodless hand grows warm.

For weeks, he reads his poetry to Olympia. She is a good listener. She does not knit or become distracted or disagree with him. For the first time, he feels like someone understands him completely.

Olympia, of course, is not real. She is a collaboration between the professor, who made the clockwork, and the Sandman, who provided the eyes. Nathaniel discovers this with horror as he rushes to propose to her and interrupts the Sandman in the act of bashing the professor over the head with Olympia's lifeless, eyeless body. It seems some deal had not been kept. The professor tells Nathaniel: Did you like the eyes? They were your own, stolen from you!

There is a pleasant epilogue in which the public claims to have known all along that Olympia was clockwork, and it becomes good practice to test the humanity of others by looking for imperfections in their dancing or habits of listening. All seems to be well with Nathaniel and Clara - until, at the top of the church tower, Nathaniel takes out the telescope to peer at the approach of someone on the horizon. Clara gets in the way of the scope, and Nathaniel, believing her to be an automaton, is seized by madness and attempts to throw her from the balcony. Then, seeing that the approaching figure is the Sandman, he leaps from the tower himself.

Important Passages:

About (imperfect) reflection and doubling:

"It is the phantom of our own selves ... which casts us into hell or transports us into heaven."

[on the impossibility of storytelling] "No form of language ... seemed to reflect even in the slightest degree the coloring of the internal picture."

"... nothing is stranger and madder than actual life; which the poet can only catch in the form of a dull reflection in a dimly polished mirror."

Artists describe Clara's eyes as lakes which reflect the landscape, while poets prefer to highlight her honesty - if she doesn't like their art, she will say so. (ie, she refuses to be a mere reflection of their desires; she is no automaton.)

In Nathaniel's darkest moment he believes in predeterminism, that everything we do is merely a reflection of the will of higher powers.

"When at last he had finished and read the poem aloud to himself, a wild horror seized him. 'Whose horrible voice is that?' he cried out."

"... It seemed as if a deep and lugubrious sigh were sounding fearfully through the room, and his breath was stopped by inward anguish. He perceived, however, that it was himself that had sighed."

"'Ah, he has never loved me, for he does not understand me.'"

"Only the poetical mind is sensitive to its like in others ... only in the love of Olympia do I discover my real self."

"Never had he known such an admirable listener ... 'You, you alone, dear one, fully understand me!' He trembled with rapture, when he considered the wonderful harmony that was revealed more and more every day between his own mind and that of Olympia. For it seemed to him as if Olympia had spoken concerning him and his poetical talent out of the depths of his own mind; as if her voice had actually sounded from within himself." [quite relevant for the AI conversation i should think]

The professor of poetry says that the whole thing is an allegory

"Many lovers, to be quite convinced that they were not enamored with wooden dolls, would request their mistresses to sing and dance a little out of time, to embroider and knit while listening, and above all, not merely to listen, but also sometimes to talk, in such a manner as presupposed actual thought and feeling."